Friday, December 01, 2006

Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda has won the 2006 Cervantes Prize

Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's top literary award.(...)Gamoneda, 76, inherited his love for literature from his father, a known modernist writer. His first published work was a collection of poems, "Sublevacion inmovil" ("Still Uprising"), in 1960. His biggest success came in the late 1980s, when his book, "Edad," was awarded the Spanish national Poetry Prize.

Founded in 1976 by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Cervantes prize, carrying a 90,180 euros (108,000 U.S. dollars) cash award, is presented to the writer whose Castilian language work as a whole is judged to have most enriched the Spanish literary canon.On Thursday, Gamoneda also received the Queen Sofia Ibero-Americana Poetry Prize at a ceremony in Madrid's Royal Palace. It had been "an overwhelming day for me", he said.The Ibero-American prize carries a 42,000-euro (50,000 dollars) cash award and is presented to living authors whose work is relevant to all Ibero-American nations, and includes both Spanish language and Portuguese writing.Gamoneda is one of the significant contemporary Spanish language poets. He was born in Oviedo in 1931 and has lived in Leon since 1934.His work includes 1960's Sublevacion Inmovil (The Motionless Revolt), 1979's Leon de la Mirada (The Look of Leon), 1982's Blues Castellano (Spanish Language Blues), 1995's Libro de los Venenos (The Poison Book) and 2003's Arden las Perdidas (The Losses Burn).

Gamoneda, 76, who was born in the northern city of Oviedo, inherited his love for literature from his father, a known modernist writer in literary circles. His first published work was a collection of poems, ''Sublevacion inmovil'' (''Still Uprising''), in 1960. Themes of pain, memory and darkness define his work.''Blues Castellano'' was published in 1982 and was translated into several languages, but his biggest success came in the late 1980s, when his book, ''Edad,'' was awarded the Spanish national Poetry Prize.Gamoneda has also translated works by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and France's Mallarme into Spanish.